UK Town Embraces Urban Farming on a Massive Scale
by Sami Grover, Carrboro, NC, USA 
on 04. 5.08
Image courtesy of David Barrie
With the UK’s chief scientist warming of a looming food crisis, and with consumers around the world changing their eating habits in the face of increasing prices, the need to find alternatives to our current food system becomes ever more pressing. TreeHugger is a big fan of urban food production and community gardening, so it’s unsurprising that we were excited to read about ambitious efforts in the UK town of Middlesborough to turn public space into productive land:
Middlesbrough borough council turned over parkland, town-centre planters and other landholdings for fruit and vegetable growing. The eight-month project culminated in a town meal outside the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, where up to 8,000 people shared meals from the food that had been grown.
This year, Middlesbrough plans to supply seeds and containers to anyone interested, and already has 2,000 individuals and groups lined up, including 31 out of 51 schools, with 280 growing sites. “This has caught people's imagination. But we've gone beyond novelty now and people want to make it a mainstream activity,” says Ian Collingwood, a regeneration consultant at the council.
While high-tech food growing solutions like vertical farming, underground agriculture, and aquaponics may have great potential in meeting the challenge of feeding the world, we suspect that projects like this one that simply reconnect people with the skills to feed themselves will be at least as important as we navigate our way out of the era of cheap food.
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Sounds like a wonderful project. The kids will remember this all their lives, and many will probably continue gardening.
Not only will they produce some good, fresh food locally, but they will connect with the soil and gain deeper insights into ecology and natural processes.
There isn't much better that eating a ripe tomato you've grown fresh off the vine. These kids will learn the difference between good produce and bland factory farmed goods.
There's no reason the urban landscape can't be much more diverse and productive. It's remarkable how many plants have been popularized based on their not producing any fruit! And with productive landscape, in will come other species to feed on it and complete the ecological web once more.
the other dimension to this project is that it was dispersed across a town-wide scale, to try to have an impact - and a lasting one - on the town's food economy and supply systems. Check out the map/'crop plan' at http://tinyurl.com/2843d9.
the other dimension to this project is that it was dispersed across a town-wide scale, to try to have an impact - and a lasting one - on the town's food economy and supply systems. Check out the map/'crop plan' at http://tinyurl.com/2843d9.
Since our food economy is so linked to oil, recent increases in the cost of a gallon of gas might improve the economic standing of eating locally. Some good information on this topic, and its urgency here.